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NZCPR CAMPAIGNS
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Dr Eric Crampton
The government finally released the Simpson-Roche report detailing the failures that led to August’s Covid outbreak in Auckland. Some of the failures, like inadequate testing regimes for MIQ staff and border workers, were entirely preventable.
Consenting processes are already slow enough and councils are hardly well positioned to assess the carbon effects of anything. Consultants providing climate impact assessments may do well, but it won’t help New Zealand’s net emissions where those emissions are already covered under the ETS.
Nobody really seems to know just what will come of the proposed changes to New Zealand’s food safety regime. Minister for Food Safety Kate Wilkinson assures us that the regime simply modernizes New Zealand legislation and, if anything, reduces the regulatory burden facing food producers. Where current legislation does little to distinguish large from small processers, the revised legislation provides a graduated scale ranging from government provision of safety information to very small informal producers of low-risk products to full-scale safety regulation for larger concerns. Despite those assurances, many small producers fear the new system will impose costs that they cannot bear. 3 News reports on a small organic food exchange whose founder says they’ll more likely close than bear the up-front costs of developing compliant food safety plans; the founder of Lisa’s Hummus says she could not have started had she been subject to the new rules. Without a legal background, it’s pretty difficult to tell just what the effects will be.
Minimum wages are a bit like minimum speed limits. For a while, they can seem not to matter too much. Then all of a sudden they start to bite.
